George Seif

George Seif was a Syrian journalist who served as Information Minister of Syria from 1964 to 1965.

Biography
George Seif was born in Damascus to a Syrian Christian family, and he worked as a radio journalist before becoming the head of Radio Damascus, the state-run media agency which was used to spread nationalist propaganda during the early 1960s. Seif was known to spread fake news stories about Syrian victories over Israel, and, during the 1963 Syrian coup d'etat, Colonel Salim Hatum had him read a proclamation which claimed that President Nazim al-Kudsi "peacefully" handed over power to the military under Amin al-Hafiz. Under al-Hafiz, Seif was named Information Minister, replacing a purged minister in a government with revolving-door ministries. In this position, he befriended the undercover Israeli Mossad spy Eli Cohen, a member of al-Hafiz's inner circle and the chief advisor to the Defense Minister. In 1965, after Cohen was exposed as a Zionist agent, Seif was sentenced to ten years of hard labor for inadvertently helping Cohen sabotage the Syrian government.